Masterpiece on the Mall

By ROBERT HUGHES

America's contribution to the language of modern architecture has been immense. But little sign of that could be seen in its capital, Washington. Where were the modern designs to rival the dominant idioms of 18th century Georgian and 19th century Beaux-Arts by the Potomac? There was not much to see. The preferred manner, in a low-horizon city dominated by L'Enfant's neoclassical plan, was Beaux-Arts thinly covered with a "modernist" veneer: the cake minus the icing. From the postwar office blocks to the alternately coarse and mincing frigidity of the 1971 Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the past 30 years of Washington architecture have been a prolonged failure of the bureaucratic imagination. There have been one or two notable exceptions, such as the 1976 National Air and Space Museum by Gyo Obata. But perhaps one more structure was needed to break this bind, to show that a modern building could embody the ceremonial gravity of "official" architecture while refusing to compromise its own inventiveness. On June 1 that structure opens to the public. It is, of course, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., designed by Architect I.M. Pei at a cost of $94.4 million furnished by Paul Mellon, his late sister and the Mellon Foundation (TIME, May 8).

No other building in recent memory --and especially no other museum building--has been greeted with such a flood of superlatives. Ordinarily this would be cause for suspicion; yet, one cannot tour the East Building without sensing that the volume of praise is justified. I.M. Pei has produced, in the fullest sense of that hackneyed but unavoidable word, a masterpiece--a structure born of sustained and highly analytical thought, exquisitely attuned to its site and architectural surroundings, conveying a sense of grand occasion without the slightest trace of pomposity. It restores the sense of craftsmanship, as distinct from routine fabrication, without which major architecture cannot exist.

One cannot call Pei's design backward-looking; but the East Building is certainly a conservative, and in many respects a classical, structure, whose visual meaning turns on the idea of established excellence. It is less a "proposition" than a calm, final statement. In that respect, it is unlike the only comparable museum (in terms of cost, elaboration and civic importance) to have been built in recent years, the Pompidou Center in the Beaubourg section of Paris. "Le Pompidoglio," as the French sardonically call it, turned out to be one of those populist-utopian fantasies of the '60s that have not yet been made to work. As a public meeting place, it certainly succeeds. Half Paris has taken to riding up and down its dramatic glass escalator tube, squinting through the pigeon droppings on the curved panes at a superb view of the city.

But in the museum's first year, only one-quarter of its 6 million visitors bothered to visit the collections. The design of Beaubourg is so hostile to the paintings and sculptures it contains as to reduce them, most of the time, to meaninglessness or even invisibility--mere patches of "information" struggling to be seen against the ambient jabber of painted ducts, tubes, registers and trusses. This garish triumph of Pop sensibility, having arrived too late, now seems destined to remain a monument to the days when many of the world's museum directors and critics were scrambling for a spot on the "antielitist" wagon.

The East Building shows no interest in such matters. Its design takes for granted that there is just one fundamental question in museum design: How can a building supply a large public with both a sense of ceremonial space and the opportunity to contemplate works of art in something akin to privacy--with no distractions from the architecture and as few as possible from one's fellow visitors? Pei's solution begins with the nature of the site, an awkward trapezoid, deprived of symmetry by the slanting cut of Pennsylvania Avenue. This ruled out the possibility of an axial plan that might have echoed the Beaux-Arts symmetry of the National Gallery's 1941 parent building, designed by John Russell Pope. Instead, Pei drew a line across the site, cutting it into two triangles--one isosceles, with its base facing the existing National Gallery, the other skinny and right-angled. The former houses the gallery's great hall and its four main levels of stacked "pods" of exhibition galleries; the latter contains the high aedicular space of the reading room and study center, which will not open to scholars for another year.

Externally then, the East Building consists of two immense prisms, sheathed with grayish-pink Tennessee marble like that of the West Building. Though the walls are mostly blind, Pei has avoided the defensive art-fortress look of many recent American museums. The austere abstraction of the building is warmed by its materials; and, despite its family resemblance to the neoclassical geometry of the 18th century architect Ledoux (of whose designs Jefferson was particularly fond), it is also an unexpectedly tactile structure. One key to this is the 19DEG angle of the study block, a knife-edged prow that invites encompassing by one hand. In elegantly deliberate contrast to the slow, patriarchal rhythms of the original National Gallery, this marble blade is as delicate a stroke of theater as may be found anywhere in modern architecture.

The grand coup, however, is inside: the East Building's central court, which rises through a complex series of levels, bridges, stairways, escalators and ramps to its culmination in the tetrahedronal space frame-skylight. This court is the "rhyme" to the West Building's cupola, but is utterly different in feeling. Here Pei has produced a ceremonial space fit to rank with the main foyer of the Paris Opera or the grandest of the 19th century's glass-and-iron railroad terminals. It projects an encompassing sense of airiness and ebullience, washed by light. From the concourse 80 ft. below, the skylight, a massive and complex structure covering 16,000 sq. ft., acquires a weblike delicacy, with an elegance that is reinforced by the almost fanatical precision of craftsmanship in the building as a whole.

The massive lintels, and the low triangular-coffered ceiling in areas off the atrium, are made of exposed reinforced concrete. But it is not the coarse beton brut introduced to architecture by Le Corbusier. The concrete looks almost as fine as beeswax. Poured into forms as carefully made as cabinets, and impregnated with marble dust, it becomes an extraordinarily subtle substance with a pink surface bloom. Though the building looks handmade throughout, it is reticently so. Nothing in its materials or their articulation interferes with the job in hand: to display works of art in tranquillity.

There were seven works commissioned for the building. Among them: a massive and rotund Henry Moore bronze at the entrance, a large Anthony Caro sculpture gesturing from a ledge in the atrium, an immense Joan Miro tapestry and Robert Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy, the largest and possibly the last (since democracy has now been restored in Spain) of his 30-year series of Elegies for the Spanish Republic. Hovering over and animating the whole central space is a huge mobile by Alexander Calder, feathery light despite its size, and lazily responding to every air current. Smaller spaces are reserved for changing exhibitions, and in this the galleries at each of the levels succeed very well, as do the tower rooms reached by skylighted stairways.

The galleries are flexible enough, with changing dry-wall partitions and even variable-height ceilings, to respond to any size art. For the show of mid-century Americans called "Subjects of the Artist" (one of six exhibitions opening this week), David Smith's Voltri sculptures are displayed in a room that provides witty drama: they are ranked on steps imitative of the Italian amphitheater at Spoleto where they were first shown.

But if the keynote of the building is a kind of nobility and finesse that, one might have thought, were all but lost to architecture, there is nothing intimidating about the East wing. It is hospitable, welcoming both to art and to its audience, and condescending to no one. Neither snooty nor tackily populist, it is a lesson in civic good manners. "The aim of architecture is to build well. Well-building hath three conditions: commodity, firm ness and delight." Sir Henry Wotton's maxim is as true today as it was 350 years ago, and Pei's building reminds us that the sense of ethical and aesthetic responsibility from which it issued is not, after all, quite dead.

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